In 1987, NEWSWEEK’S Stryker McGuire, now chief of correspondents, found himself deskbound. His solution: quit the magazine for a year or so to roam Latin America in a Toyota Land Cruiser, leaving his journalistic detachment back at 444 Madison Avenue. “Streets With No Names” is an impassioned, opinionated account of what he saw-and, more important, whom he met, from gauchos to guerrillas. “I was looking for liberation,” he writes, “and my real liberators were, of course, people.”
title: “By Our Writers” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-11” author: “Peggy Craft”
From Jimmy Hoffa to John Connally to Michael Milken, when the mighty got in trouble, they turned to Edward Bennett Williams. He was a great lawyer–even prosecutors studied his tactics–and a great character. His nights in Toots Shor’s are as legendary as his days before the U.S. Supreme Court. He was a driven man, devoted to what he called “contest living.” The courtroom couldn’t contain his energies; he was president of the Washington Redskins and owned the Baltimore Orioles. In a lively biography that doesn’t spare its subject, NEWSWEEK’S Evan Thomas has captured Williams’s many appetites.
title: “By Our Writers” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-11” author: “Kenneth Feinberg”
Tired of sending your kid to a mediocre school? Frustrated by high property taxes that fuel a tepid education engine? Then do something about it. In his new book, NEWSWEEK Contributing Editor Larry Martz shows you how. With clarity and verve, Martz describes programs around the nation that parents, teachers and community people have run to make significant improvements in their local public schools. Those are mere examples. Martz is after bigger game: asking citizens-you!to use their own imagination and energy. By small bites, argues Martz, schools can be made better. As he asks pointedly: do you have something more important to do?
A Mother’s Touch. By Jay Mathews. 265 pages. Holt. $21.95.
Tiffany Callo has two little boys. She also has cerebral palsy. California officials took her sons away, concerned that she was not physically able to care for them. But Callo, a resourceful, scrappy young woman, disagreed. Her attempt to buck the system and win them back was one more challenge in a demanding life. NEWSWEEK correspondent Jay Mathews has told her story with clear-eyed sensitivity, and used it as a model for the debate over family values and the rights of the disabled.
title: “By Our Writers” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-08” author: “Jacob Robbins”
Liberals should stop trying to use taxing and spending policies to narrow the gap between rich and poor, argues NEWSWEEK contributing editor Mickey Kaus in this readable, provocative book. Instead, they should embrace a “Civic Liberalism” that strengthens the “public spheres” in which social classes mingle. Kaus suggests adopting compulsory national service, European-style national health care and communal day-care centers. But neighborhoods and schools won’t be mixed until society erases the urban underclass and the fear it generates. For that, he offers an ambitious plan of abolishing welfare but giving a job to anyone who wants to work.
title: “By Our Writers” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-30” author: “Lynette Wilson”
title: “By Our Writers” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-09” author: “Celeste Hamilton”
title: “By Our Writers” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-05” author: “Jonathan Dietzler”
title: “By Our Writers” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-25” author: “Victor Cobb”
title: “By Our Writers” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-25” author: “April Keeton”
title: “By Our Writers” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-07” author: “Shirley Conaway”
title: “By Our Writers” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-28” author: “Jorge Piserchio”
title: “By Our Writers” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-13” author: “Angela Covert”
title: “By Our Writers” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-29” author: “Rodney Langley”
title: “By Our Writers” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-16” author: “William Abbott”
title: “By Our Writers” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-08” author: “Alysa Brown”
title: “By Our Writers” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-17” author: “Bruce Austin”
POLITICS IS NOT ONLY THE ART OF THE possible, but of personality. Newsweek Contributing Editor Eleanor Clift and her husband, Tom Brazaitis, Washington bureau chief of The Plain Dealer, profile eight Capitol Hill players in War Without Bloodshed: The Art of Politics (400 pages. Scribner. $25). As in all good war stories, the warriors are as vivid as the battles. From showing Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s rapier wit at work to chronicling Dole aide Sheila Burke’s struggle to balance politics with motherhood, the authors give a fly-on-the-wall look at Washington power-brokering.
title: “By Our Writers” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-06” author: “Tyler Hinojosa”
title: “By Our Writers” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-17” author: “Cecile Gunter”
UNCOVERING CLINTON by Michael Isikoff (Crown). The events that culminated with the first impeachment of a president since Reconstruction began when Monica Lewinsky was still in college. In 1994, Paula Jones went public. The media largely yawned, but Michael Isikoff, then of The Washington Post and now of NEWSWEEK, did not–and the trail led to Monica, and follows right-wing “elves” bent on bringing down a president and White House spinners determined to protect Clinton from his own worst instincts.
